An otherwise social and affable guy – the crew calls him “Monty” – Amazing Race Canada host Jon Montgomery is deliberately not friendly with the contestants.

“I’m very stand-offish,” the former Winter Olympic gold medalist says. “I was seated next to (eventual co-winner) Tim Jr. on a flight by chance in Season 1. And the host of the show can’t be sitting next to one of the racers on a flight.

“Of course, we switched seats. The only time I really interact with racers is on the pit-stop mat.”

He takes no part in the selection process either – which means the 10 teams that embark on Season 4 of The Amazing Race Canada this week are as new to him at taping time as they are to us.

“They’re a surprise to me every season. We’ve got an amazing group that does the casting. And if you’re an individual that travels the country from coast to coast, there’s going to be conflicts of interest.

“In Canada there’s six degrees of separation from everybody. I’m sure if I looked close, if they’re in Manitoba, I guarantee you could connect them to me in two separations,” the Russell, Man., native says.

“And you don’t want to be involved in the screening process and have somebody not make the cut because you know their uncle’s brother’s dog’s sister’s cousin.”

He cites as an example, the “hockey players” and Season 2 runners-up Meaghan and Natalie. “We’re from the same world. It would be terrible for me to say, ‘I’ve met Meaghan and Natalie before. They can’t be on the show.’ And I had met them before, just in passing.”

Montgomery is, however, a student of how they play the game. Brawn seems to have played a part in the past two season’s winners – the buff Hamilton bros Gino and Jesse in a race with wrestlers Nick and Matt last year and athletic Parry Sound boys Mickey and Pete winning against Meaghan and Natalie. No woman has been on a winning team to date.

“The girls could easily have won,” Montgomery says of the hockey players. “They won eight legs of the race beforehand. They didn’t have more brawn than Mickey and Pete. The one piece of the puzzle they had to win eight legs was mental preparedness and the ability to work under pressure. They weren’t physical leviathans. They were strong girls, but they’re not superhuman.”

As for last season, much-less-buff (but very entertaining) brothers Sean and Brent were in the final three. And, Montgomery says, they didn’t lose because they didn’t match up physically.

“It was that one stunt on top of BC Place (riding a bicycle on a plank hundreds of feet up). Sean couldn’t get his head around the heights. That was a mental obstacle, not a physical one.”

And then there’s the out-of-country travel. Winnipeggers Brian and Cynthia were eliminated in Kolkata, India, last year. “I’d never experienced heat like that before,” Montgomery says. “Probably not a lot of Canadians have experienced 45 degree heat. I don’t think Brian and Cynthia dealt with the foreign shock as well as some of the others. Now, I think teams are more mentally prepared to leave the country at some point.”

The ex-skeleton racer jokes about his own physical training for the show. “I start eating a bag lunch every day a month before so I become used to eating unbalanced meals.”

In fact, he says he kind of envies the frenzied activity of the contestants.

“For a young man like me, seemingly young, I felt like my mental health maybe suffered when I became a retired athlete,” he says. “It wasn’t even tangible. It was like that joy you got from training was diminished and gone.

“My life is kind of evolving and I'm figuring out what it all means.” Evolving more quickly as it turns out. “My wife (fellow Winter Olympian Darla Deschamps) and I are expecting a baby in August. So yeah, things are changing. You’d think from the timing of this race and our schedule that we’d planned it. But no, we just got lucky.

“I expect things will be kind of the same but different. I usually put Darla to bed and have ‘Jonny time.’ That might change into a ‘first feeding’ I do myself.”